I believe that there is a necessary connection in both directions between the physical and the mental, but that it cannot be discovered a priori. Opinion is strongly divided on the credibility of some kind of functionalist reductionism, and I won't go through my reasons for being on the antireductionist side of that debate. Despite significant attempts by a number of philosophers to describe the functional manifestations of conscious mental states, I continue to believe that no purely functionalist characterization of a system entails-simply in virtue of our mental concepts-that the system is conscious.

The problem is one of opposition between subjective and objective points of view. There is a tendency to seek an objective account of everything before admitti…

Eventually, I believe, current attempts to understand the mind by analogy with man-made computers that can perform superbly some of the same external tasks as …

Everyone is entitled to commit murder in the imagination once in a while, not to mention lesser infractions.

My wife Margaret and I sold our house to Sir Roger Penrose and his wife... Talking to Roger, I found we both agreed that AI, as they call it, is not going to b…

The body is the outermost layer of the mind.

Man's consciousness not only reflects the objective world, but creates it.